


You're Listening To A Dead Man Speak

by biichan



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Afterlife, Character Death, Community: lgbtfest, M/M, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-01
Updated: 2010-06-01
Packaged: 2017-10-09 20:41:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/91393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biichan/pseuds/biichan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The afterlife is not exactly the most hospitable of environments. You might as well talk to whoever else is there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You're Listening To A Dead Man Speak

**Author's Note:**

> Infinite thanks to the Evil Midnight Lurker for beta-ing this with so little time before it was due.
> 
> This is the first HP fic I've written in three years. Most of my old Moodyfic isn't on AO3, but for anyone who remembers it, unlikely as that is, I'd like to note that the Moody in this story isn't the same Moody I used to write. (He's still quite gay, though.)

Oh. You startled me.

No, no. Sit wherever you like. I don't mind.

Am I still angry at you? Yes. No. I don't know. I was just as angry at Al, though, for telling you yes without even asking me about it. We made up, though. Before—

Well. That was some time ago. I don't know how long I've been here, but it's been long enough. Funny. You're not the first of Al's old friends to pass me by. Most of them are in a hurry to get somewhere else, though. Can't say I blame them. It's not the most hospitable of environments.

...

How I met him? Didn't he tell you about it?

Oh. You want to hear my side of things. Fine, then.

It was during the War. We both worked in Churchill's War Rooms. He was a secretary. I was a radio operator. We were friends, I suppose. Friendly. We liked the same kind of music. I thought he was good-looking in a sort of gingery-brown badly-in-need-of-a-haircut way. Sometimes I wondered if he was another invert, but I was never really sure.

Yes, I know he was undercover at the time. Well, I didn't know it then, but he told me later. I suppose he was well-suited for it, what with his dad having come from my world and Al having grown up as much in mine as yours. He was better at pretending to be one of us than most of your kind.

What changed things? He kissed me.

It was during an air raid. We were alone together in a broom closet. A few days before that there'd been that big to-do with that Paisley scientist and his automatons. I asked Al why afterward, but he never told me.

Sometimes I think there was a lot he never told me.

I mean, it took him four years until he told me he was a wizard.

I think he was waiting for the war to be officially over, actually. It was V-J Day. We were on the roof of the Treasury building, watching the stars come out. I'd asked him if he wanted to get a two-bedroom flat together and tell people we were saving money by sharing digs. He said he was going to do something very stupid and shot a ball of light out from the wand I hadn't noticed he'd been carrying.

Was I frightened? Of course not! Startled me a bit, though. That's when he said he was a wizard. "Like Aleister Crowley?" I asked and he laughed at me and said not exactly, but sort of. Only no one had snapped Al's wand for breaking some international statute. Though he was breaking it then.

Yes, I'm _aware_ what a risk he took telling me. It's a bit worrying in retrospect, but flattering too.

So. We got the flat and switched off which bedroom we slept in. I took a job as a technician for the BBC. He went back to being an Auror, which as far as I understood it meant he was something like a cross between a Scotland Yard Detective and an MI5 agent, only with a magic wand. It meant he kept odd hours, which I didn't completely like, but I got used to it. I got used to a lot of things, like owls always perching on the windowsill and Al literally _popping_ in and out of the flat. Eventually I retired—well, we both retired, but I did it first—and found a little cottage together, where we stayed until... well, until I came here.

Oddly enough, in all those years, I don't think I ever met more than a handful of wizards. I don't think Al was ashamed of me. I hope he wasn't. There just weren't any reasons for me to have much contact with that part of his life. His parents were dead, so he wasn't going to introduce me to them, not even as his friend and flatmate. As for his living family... well, the only one he ever talked to himself was his cousin Caspar and Caspar's wife and kids and _they_ either didn't know about me—in the case of the wife and kids—or in Caspar's case wished I didn't exist in the first place.

I only met Caspar the once. It was not long after Al and I had got the flat together. Al had gone off to make breakfast while I'd been having a bit of a lie-in. When breakfast never came, I went off to the kitchen to investigate and there they were: Al and a gangly young man with the same nose, arguing. I hung back from the door to listen.

"What the hell do you think you're doing, Al?" the man was saying. "I suppose I can see you wanting to live with the muggles—you always liked it better than our world, anyway—but _sleeping_ with one?"

"We have separate bedrooms," said Al.

The man snorted. "You're not fooling anyone. This can't be about economy. After a decade with law enforcement, they have to be paying you enough by now to get a flat this size without sharing. The exchange rate can't be that bad."

"Maybe I enjoy the company," Al said.

"And you can't enjoy company of your own kind? You aren't the only inverted wizard in Britain, Al, you _know_ that."

"Is this your way of saying that you—and Char too, I suppose—want me to have a nice safe affair with a married pureblood? Because I seem to recall you being very much in favor of that plan once."

"I'm saying you ought to find a _wizard_, Al. Someone you don't have to obliviate twice a day. Another halfblood or a even a mudblood—and yes, a pureblood would be nice, but it's not as if you'll be having children. Besides, I doubt anyone from a respectable family would be interested, not after you turned in evidence against your last lover."

Al's voice got very cold: "He was breaking the law."

"Al, _you're_ breaking the law with your muggle. You know as well as I do they'd gaol you twice over if they could."

"They haven't enforced the Witchcraft Acts in years," Al started to say—and then his tone of voice changed. "Bob? Is that you?"

"Sorry," I said, slinking into the kitchen. "I wanted to see if you'd made breakfast."

"Not yet," Al said, rubbing his brow. "Sorry about that. Bob, this is my cousin Caspar."

I stuck out my hand. "Pleased to meet you," I lied.

Caspar didn't take my hand. "I'll see you at Christmas," he told Al. "Char and the children are expecting it. Barty is especially looking forward to seeing his godfather. _Alone_."

And then, with a crack, he was gone.

And then Al said: "Well. That went better than I thought."

...

You all that weren't much better.

Than Caspar. You weren't much better. Oh, you were friendlier, but I'd been with Al more than twenty years before that day I came home to find you sitting at the kitchen table, dressed like the second coming of Oscar Wilde, and you were only there because you wanted something from me.

"You must be Robert," you said. "Alastor's told me quite a lot about you."

"He won't be home until late," I said, somewhat confused. "Excuse me, but you are...?"

"Albus Dumbledore."

"Oh," I said. "Al's old professor. I've heard a lot about you too."

"Headmaster," you said.

"Pardon?"

"I was recently made headmaster of Alastor's _alma mater_."

"Oh," I said. "Well. Congratulations."

"Thank you," you said, fairly preening. "I understand some congratulation of my own are to be in order, what with the decriminalization I've been hearing about. Well done."

"Ah, I didn't have anything to do with that."

"Still," you said, "it is more than I dared to hope from your world. And actually, I'm not here to talk to Alastor. I'm here to talk to you."

"I've asked Alastor to assist me with something," you said. "He said he wanted to talk it over with you. I'm here to ask you—no, to beg you—to let him. The fate of both our worlds may rest on it."

You said it did. Maybe it did. The story you spun me—a strange death-cult lead by an unknown madman, the refusal of your world's government to acknowledge its existence, and the unknown threat it posed to anyone who didn't fit a stringent definition of purity—it spooked me. I found myself believing in spite of myself. That night I told Al to help you.

There were days that I regretted it.

How could I not? After that, nothing was the same. I would go for days without seeing Al—weeks, in some cases—and he would come home bloody and bruised and all too often scarred. He lost a chunk of his nose. He lost his leg. He lost his _eye_, never mind the uncanny replacement he found for it, and somebody carved him half a Glasgow smile.

He saw Death Eaters in every shadow. It wasn't without reason.

You were a second father to him. He did it for you. And because I told him to. Because you asked me to.

He told me once he wasn't just doing it for you. That he was doing it for me. Because the Death Eaters would want to see me dead for loving a wizard. And he was doing it for his poor dead mother and impure father, fifty years gone, because the Death Eaters would have done the same to them.

But you were the one that asked him to do it in the first place.

I was relieved when it was all over. I didn't realize it would never be over.

...

I didn't think I would necessarily die in bed. There were times I thought that I knew I wouldn't. During the Blitz, I was convinced I wouldn't make it through the bombing. Later, I used to worry about being beaten to death by a queer-basher in a dark alley.

I never thought I would be murdered in my own home.

Al knew him. The man that murdered me. He called him "Barty." I thought at first it was the godson I never met, but he was too young and then I remembered the godson had a son of his own that had come to a bad end, Al said, and—

Well. I was right then.

There was green light. And then I was here. And I've been here, ever since.

Back in the War Rooms, waiting for Al. I've been waiting a long time. I suppose you're waiting for someone too. I've seen a lot of people come through. Friends of Al's, sometimes. You were the first to know who I was. Maybe you'll be the only one. I suppose I was his secret. A long time ago, he was mine. I'd like to think that there won't have to be secrets now. We're all dead anyway.

When Al gets here, we'll go up to the roof of the Treasury Building and we'll watch the stars come out.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the LGBT Fest. Prompt: _1476\. Harry Potter, any (including OCs), the difficulties of being in a same sex relationship with a Muggle._


End file.
